Overview

In his book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024), Yuval Harari makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the AI revolution, which is bearing down on us with alarming speed.

Also watch Yuval Harari in conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy on ‘Mindfulness, AI and the Future of Humanity’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r5lw3jPrUk

As Mustafa Suleyman of DeepMind says, “Harari has a unique ability to unite both history’s finest details and its grandest megatrends in a single view.”

While Generative AI has many potential benefits for our society, its downside risks are considerable.

Champions of AI’s Deep Learning, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI, is captive to Modernity’s dream of continual progress via science and technology, and what many regard as a religious movement in the idea of the Singularity—transcendence to super-human intelligence, linked to the colonisation of Space.

Setting aside the AI hyberbole, Harari’s core argument is that the emergence of computers capable of pursuing goals and making decisions by themselves changes the fundamental structure of our information network, and therefore society and its institutions (p.204). He argues that humans have created an inorganic intelligence, which is a new actor in the evolution of our world. AI is not a tool. AI is an agent. For this reason he calls AI ‘alien intelligence’ rather than ‘artificial intelligence’. This is what requires our attention.

Returning to Suleyman again, Harari discusses the implications of the AI AlphaGo program, which defeated the human Go champion. Its Move 37, which clinched the win, demonstrated the alien nature of AI as this move could not be explained by human Go players. Neither could Suleyman and his team work out how AlphaGo made this decision. (p.333)

Harari asserts that in the next decades, AI will likely even gain the ability to create new life-forms, either by writing genetic code or by inventing an inorganic code, animating inorganic entities.

Information Networks

In the tradition of French sociologist, Michael Foucault, Harari looks to how information is created and organised as a network as the key to understanding human society throughout history. This contrasts with the Marxist idea that we should look to the social relations of economic production.

However these are not either/or. For example Foucault shows that how information is developed and validated is also an expression of the social relations of production. Who determines what information to collect? Who determines what conclusions about it are valid—that constitute truth? These are all contestable when we look at the underrepresentation of who gets to ‘write history’—the predominance of male voices, the absence of female perspectives, and the absence of the voices of different ethnic minority groups. These same issues are characteristic of the generation of data scientists currently shaping AI.

When we look, what do we see? What lens are we looking through?

As post colonial thinkers such as Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa de Oliveira would say, up until recently Modernity, the age of science and technological progress, is ‘white’. The rise and rise of China as a new technological superpower may challenge its ‘whiteness’, yet remain captive to the Western dream of continued ‘progress’ via technology and extractivist logic.

Another issue arises in relation to the energy demands of the huge data centres that power AI.  Hallam Stevens, professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at James Cook University, in an article in the Conversation (27 September 2024), discusses the expanding resources needed  for deep learning (AI) to “work”. He says, while we can acknowledge the great gains and remarkable achievements of technology—modern medicine, transportation and communication (to name a few) we cannot pretend that these have not come at a significant cost. They have come at a cost both to some humans – for whom the gains of the global north have meant diminishing returns for the global south – and to animals, plants and ecosystems, ruthlessly exploited and destroyed by the extractive might of capitalism plus technology.”

The Framing Problem

Harari’s grand sweep of history and analysis of the role of information is entirely framed within the Western knowledge system (epistemology). He seems unaware that the ‘stone age’ of his historical sweep is still alive and speaking to us through the voices of post-colonial scholars who, having mastered the Western knowledge system, are now critiquing its framework through the lens of the relationalist logic of First Nations knowledge systems.  Despite the hegemony of the Western knowledge system, via imperialism and global capitalism, First Nations knowledges are still alive, grounded in a deep understanding of the fundamental ecological laws that have prescribed life on Planet Earth.

Their critique is gaining more and more momentum, given that the multi-faceted crises bearing down on us—global warming, climate change, environmental devastation, increasing and unsustainable wealth inequality within nation states, and the more recent problems with social media concerning mental health and conspiracy thinking—all linked to the logic embedded in the Western knowledge system. That the root of our crises is epistemic.

Relationalism

Increasingly these crises are seen as arising from the extractivist logic that underpins modernity, which sits in opposition to the relationalist logic that underpins how the world actually works through its complex ecological systems. And how these are also mirrored in the way human beings experience reality as one of interbeing with other humans and all of the natural world. The knowledge systems (epistemology) of different cultures are expressions of how this issue is expressed in culture.  We have ignored the ‘truth’ of relationalism at our peril. It has left us feeling alienated from the natural world, and increasingly alienated from one another—marooned in loneliness, poor mental health and fractious communities.

The lie of Western rationalism is that it is possible to arrive at some externally validated truth as ‘objective reality’ such as, via science. But ‘reality’ is both subjective and intersubjective, and science is but one lens through which we ‘see’, and it is a lens that has hitherto led Western culture to highly segmented ways of understanding ‘reality’ via academic disciplines and the ‘silo’ nature of government bureaucracy and commercial entities. We have become lost in the ‘parts’, the ‘whole’ hidden from view.

So, when Harari asks why the exponential growth of information and knowledge have not been matched by any growth in wisdom, he also looks to this core idea of relationalism:

“Wisdom is much older than human history. It is elemental, the foundation of organic life, created not by an infallible God, but by the evolutionary processes of ecological systems over four billion years.” (p.404).

While Western science has finally discovered this ecological foundation, our culture and institutions remain highly segmented, still beating to the drum of ‘winner takes all’ as a supposed ‘law of the jungle’. It points to the failure of the rational tradition in the Western knowledge system to ever develop a knowledge system that grapples with the distinction between wisdom and knowledge, and therefore has failed to develop any pedagogy for the development of what we mean by wisdom. Wisdom has been left to religion, but given religion’s role in contemporary political and militarised conflict, there is an equal failure here.

What does this mean for the new world of AI? Reading through Harari’s grand analysis, we face the real possibility that the arrival of AI might mark the evolution of a new species on Planet Earth: a non-organic intelligence that has agency of its own. Just as we are beginning to understand that the Earth also has its own agency, which does not bend to human will. Climate change is upon us, threatening the viability of huge areas of human habitation. Environmental devastation is ruining the sustainability of many ecosystems, oceans are acidifying. Many species are becoming extinct and this is accelerating under the impact of both climate change and human agricultural practices.

If AI is indeed a new inorganic intelligence, will it be able to develop its own interaction with Earth’s agency, bypassing the failure of humanity to effectively manage its relationship with Earth’s agency?

The Search for Truth, Order and Wisdom

Through his grand sweep of history, Hariri shows how what makes human unique among Earth’s creatures is our ability to expand our capacity for social groupings through information networks, involving shared culture (stories) and social order, as society has been shaped by different forms of information networks: from language and oral histories to text and the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, and finally to the digital revolution through computer, the Internet, and now AI.

Harari asserts that to survive and flourish, every human information network needs to do two things simultaneously: discover truth and create order. He fails to mention that it also needs to grapple with wisdom. Which is why he poses the question: If humans are so clever, why are we so self-destructive? Why has the increase in human knowledge not led to a similar growth in wisdom?

How will the coders of AI, and their masters, even consider the logic of wisdom in their design of algorithms or even the systems that seek to regulate them, when our knowledge system ignores the very idea of wisdom; has no real idea of what it means or how to develop and sustain it? Can AI go beyond the data that humans have fed it?

Naïve View of Information

Hariri suggests that society has been shaped by the naïve view of information: that more information leads to wisdom. By gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks will achieve a better understanding of things, which makes the network not only powerful, but wise.

The core tenet has been that information is an essentially good thing and the more we have of it, the better. That given enough information and enough time, we are bound to discover the truth about things ranging from viral infections to racist biases, thereby developing not only our power but also the wisdom necessary to use that power well.

He asserts that this is the semi-official ideology of the computer age and the internet (p.xvii). The naïve information view sees information as an attempt to represent reality and dismisses any ‘mistakes’ as unfortunate cases of misinformation or disinformation. So, the solution for problems caused by misinformation or disinformation is more information (fact checking).

This bears remarkable similarities to the way in which market economics dismisses the ‘facts that don’t fit its model’ as externalities, and attempts a solution by converting more and more phenomena into marketised data—from human behaviour to natural capital. In this vein of logic, futures thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Nearer (2024) claim that nearly every aspect of life is getting progressively better as a result of exponentially improving technology (p.xviii), in much the same way that economic neo-liberal economist and politicians claim that people are experiencing more and more prosperity through consumer-based economic growth and marketisation of all aspects of life.

However, the conundrum we face is that while knowledge depends on the analysis of information to detect meaning, knowledge does not confer wisdom. Only those meanings that the epistemology sets can be detected. While our universities are devoted to the exponential increase in the amount of knowledge in the world, and we loudly proclaim we have moved to the ‘knowledge economy’, with the associated collection of more and more information/data, Harari concludes that with all this information circulating at breathtaking speeds, humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself. Knowledge represents only the selected patterns determined by particular knowledge systems (epistemologies). It is clearly not the same as wisdom.

Wisdom

One Buddhist teacher uses the following metaphor to describe the nature of wisdom that informs Tibetan Buddhism as a knowledge system.

Imagine a sky, empty, spacious and pure from the beginning; its essence is like this.  Imagine a sun, luminous, clear, unobstructed, and spontaneously present; its nature is like this.  Imagine that sun shining out impartially on us and all things, penetrating in all directions; its energy, which is the manifestation of compassion is like this: nothing can obstruct it and it pervades everywhere (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 2002, page 157). 

When I first encountered the wisdom knowledge tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, I tried to explore what wisdom meant in my non-Buddhist Western culture. And because I am Australian, I began this journey by exploring how the idea of wisdom figured in Australia’s First Nations’ cultures with their idea of Elders who hold responsibility, as cultural custodians, for the ‘Law’. This is encoded in songlines and ceremony; where the deepest layers involve esoteric knowledge that is only passed on to those considered ‘ready’ to hold such knowledge. For this reason, such Elders are often referred to as Law men or Law women—the ones consulted for example, on Native Title matters.

Perhaps the closest we come to this idea of Elders in the Western system is the role of High Court Judges – the final arbiters. But even here, the idea of wisdom is a hidden ‘unknown’, and where many decry that decisions of ‘law’ are not necessarily decisions that confer ‘justice’.

This question about wisdom took me off to an Aboriginal Cultural weekend hosted by Tranby College, where I met the late Yankunytjatjara Elder, Tjipi Bob Randall. Of course he couldn’t share any esoteric knowledge with me, but he did explain that you don’t become an Elder just by growing old. To be regarded as an Elder comes from the way you have served your community and held to its deep cultural Laws. Throughout his life, Bob attempted to build a bridge to Western ways of thinking through his ‘kanyini’ system, which he expounded on in his book, Songman (2003) and in a documentary (2006).

After meeting up with various people in the Christian and Judaic tradition, where the idea of wisdom seems to fall into the idea of ‘tempered common sense’ through lived experience, or a more esoteric idea of living with God’s grace as some sort of spiritual connection, I resorted to asking the question: “What are the qualities you look for in someone you regard as wise?” Invariably the answer included such qualities as having a wide perspective on things, including insight, patience, compassion, lack of bias or prejudice, and being able to see all sides of an issue.

This question of what constitutes wisdom, and how do we develop it, takes us back to the insights of major religions, which all identify basic flaws in humans arising from our susceptibility to emotions and limited understanding, when making decisions. Here we are not just talking about lack of proper information (truth) but about a fundamental psychic flaw in the very nature of being human. Why are we so susceptible to desire (the dopamine effect), and when it is frustrated, to anger?

The Flaw – Sin and Ignorance

In Christianity, which is the dominant influence on the evolution of Western cultural thinking about ‘why humanity lacks wisdom’, the basic flaw in humans is identified as ‘original sin’ and the ‘Doctrine of The Fall’. Unfortunately, it is here in Christian theology that we also find the origins of misogyny: Eve, the archetypal female, is the temptress who lures Adam, the archetypal male, via his susceptibility to lust into sin away from a state of original holiness. Thus damming the future of humanity with their susceptibility to being ensnared in the Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. The chief culprit in much of Christian theology is human concupiscence (hurtful desire) linked to sexual desire, which almost uniquely among species is always potentially ‘on’, unmoored from the biological imperative to procreate.

In Buddhism the basic flaw is identified as ‘co-emergent ignorance’, which arises with human embodiment, which veils our potential for ‘co-emergent wisdom’. In the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition this ignorance is not recognising this potential, because it is veiled by our instinctual responses of attachment and aversion. These three faults are known as the ‘three mind poisons’. This is further linked to imputed (conceptual) ignorance, whereby we mistakenly separate ‘self’ from ‘other’, as separate ‘things’ , which is the basis of ego-centrism and the problem of narcissism. This is also part of the way we reify reality into ‘things’ instead of experiencing reality as processes (including our sense of a self) occurring through the flow of interdependence, which is the basis of a relationalist logic.

In Buddhist understanding, this co-emergent ignorance gives rise to the kleshas (conflicting or negative emotions): ignorance/delusion, aversion/hatred, attachment/desire, pride/arrogance/conceit, envy/jealousy. In the Buddhist tradition, wisdom is non-dual, a quality of all-encompassing clarity/awareness, replete with compassion that is alert and relaxed, but undisturbed by the thoughts and emotions that relentlessly flicker across the mind, easily ‘grabbed’ by algorithms designed to catch attention.

Unlike in Christianity, where original sin can only be mediated through Jesus Christ, in Mahayana Buddhism, co-emergent ignorance can be overcome through one’s own capacity to train one’s mind in pure awareness, revealing that the basis of wisdom is also co-emergent. Buddhism has developed a complex epistemology and pedagogy for humans to develop this capacity to release our inherent capacity for wisdom, referred to as our ‘Buddha Nature’.

All of the religions also deal with our human flaws by advocating the ‘right way’ to live. For example, in Christianity this comes from the Ten Commandments said to be given to humans by an all-knowing, infallible God. In Buddhism this comes from the Eightfold Path, said to be given as teachings by Prince Siddhatha after he became Buddha, the Awakened One, following his own meditative realisation under the Bodhi Tree.

In the religions of the book, the source of knowledge and wisdom is beyond the human realm – God, revealed through his prophets. In Buddhism the source of knowledge and wisdom is through the guidance of a spiritual teacher, and which can be realised through the path of right living and meditative training of the mind.

Where the two traditions differ substantially is the idea of infallibility. In the religions of the book, the words of God are said to be infallible, and therefore authoritative. In Buddhism, there is no infallibility and all practitioners are urged to test the validity of teachings through their own subjective experience in guided meditative training and philosophical inquiry. This has some similarity to the tradition of scientific inquiry in the Western knowledge system, where knowledge is advanced by empirically testable hypotheses. But the scientific tradition makes no claim for advancing wisdom, and many scientific discoveries and their translation into technology have had provenly destructive impacts.

Implications for AI

We pay passing attention to the qualities we look for in someone we regard as wise in our education system, other than attempts to encode ‘right behaviour’ in codes of conduct and value statements. But clearly, in modern culture, the predominant qualities that are actually rewarded are not about wisdom, but about narrower ideas of expertise, fame and wealth, encoded in social position, power and the material attributes of wealth accumulation.

What does this mean for the arrival of our new species—inorganic intelligent entities with their own agency?

As Harari notes, AI with the ability to learn and create by itself, and form its own extended information networks, is not a tool, but an agent. These entities are evolving from the algorithms codes by software engineers working for corporations in search of maximising profit, militarised interests in search of defeating their ‘enemies’, whether this be in the hands of nation states, rogue insurgencies or criminal enterprises, or governments seeking to maintain social order in the face of challenges to their authority and power. If AI is self-learning and can evolve beyond human-given orders, what directions will it take?

Given the failure of most human cultures to develop wisdom, despite vast increases in information and knowledge, how will AI, this new Inorganic Intelligence, deal with the problematic of wisdom?